One other thing that I've kinda had to come to terms with is a seemingly stronger tendency to define and and separate gender expectations. Not that we don't do this in the States, too, but it does seem comparatively overt over here.
Thankfully, I'm not nearly so rabidly sensitive to gender stereotyping as I was even a few years ago; indeed, as a taekwondo-obsessed teenager, God help the person who tried to tell me what girls do and don't do. In fact I feel more comfortable in my skin these days than ever before (a delightful aspect of increasing age). But it's still weird to be shopping for sleeping bags and be directed to the "ladies'" section. Ladies need separate sleeping bags? Why yes, I am enlightened: they are narrower and a bit shorter, and the foot area is better insulated. Okay, I reply, I suppose that makes some sense. Hey, says Bert, how come my feet don't get to be better insulated? Because women tend to have colder feet, explains the salesman.
I know sleeping bags are an odd place to start digging out evidence for gender attitudes. Yet I think this reflects a marked overall tendency to separate Women's Things from Men's Things. Of course in this case, we were also simply observing clever marketing strategy at work: the female versions are indisputably cuter, with flower patterns and cheerful colors. Marketers clearly believe that, if given an option, women will prefer women-specific things. And they're right, someone's buying it. Indeed, I found the cute sleeping bags quite appealing.
So why does this still make me feel somehow uneasy? Maybe I can illustrate it with a much more extreme example: imagine if there were explicitly black-people and white-people sleeping bags. One can argue that this is indeed the case, that marketers certainly aim for specific target groups. But imagine if you walked into a sport shop and the salesclerk suggested that you might like to see the outdoor equipment for blacks. You could justify it with all kinds of physical and social evidence: these deeper jewel colors look nice with darker skin, for example. Here are the sleeping bags for Asians, with elegant bamboo-screen patterns. Wouldn't that just be... weird? I guess I just wonder if it's vaguely dangerous to create artificial segregation where it's not overtly necessary.
Yet no one here seems to share my discomfort. A nice lady once showed me her shiny pink cell phone and proclaimed that it's perfect for Frauen, with its unthreatening technology and a calorie counter when you go walking. I smiled and complimented it. Hey, if you're pleased, you're pleased, right? But then I remembered the radio DJ who scoffed that if a woman could figure out Microsoft's new operating system then anyone could, and his female colleague just chuckling politely instead of picking him up by the throat (which is what I would have attempted to do). Then again, maybe she wasn't sure how she was supposed to react on the radio. In any case, it does seem that although the law certainly insists on surface equality, such men-do-this-and-women-do-this attitudes are apparently more tolerated -- even often accepted -- here.
Of course not all separation is equally irrelevant. There are women's parking spaces, for example, which sit in better-lit areas closer to the door. This is of course a commendable idea, considering the higher chance for women to be targeted by criminal activity in parking garages than men. I'd happily make use of this, and hope that others would, too. But the signs advertising these parking spaces bug me: you see a cartoon female selecting her parking space not according to safety, but based on its being "too dark, too ugly, too dirty... ah, perfect" -- which seems to shift the focus from practicality to pure (and even ridiculous: I mean, too ugly?) perceived female persnicketiness. An important difference. Yet no one I have ever prodded about this finds it weird.
Maybe my Feminist Kevlar is not entirely as stashed away as I thought; or maybe Germans are generally just more comfortable in their assigned male-female roles than some of us twitchy Americans.
4 comments:
Boy, now there's a topic rife for blood boiling...
I can see certain rationalization for separating things, particularly products: when there are a lot of items to choose from, it's easier if you can have one big binary question to answer so you can rule out a whole half (or more) of the stuff to look at. But what if I would have liked some of those men's shoes? It's all very well and good when you fit the average, but being somebody who's never fit the average for my gender (not the right shape, not the right interests), it's frustrating. No, I don't want boob room, boob support, or boob accents. No, I don't want a trimmed in waist, or saddle bags at the hips. No, I don't want everything form-fitting, and no, i certainly don't want your pants so low and your shirts so short they're always showing my belly skin and ass crack.
It's extra frustrating because John believes in a lot of these divisions too, without even thinking about them. Once, not long after we started dating, we were out with his kids hiking by a stream and stopped to cool off, and he commented something about skipping stones being a boy skill. Um, excuse me?? Maybe it's been more commonly done by boys in the recent American past, but there's no reason to propagate that somehow that should continue, despite interest or aptitude. It's hard to convince some people that a lot of these perceived, even statistically verifiable differences are just socially trained, or even that they're partially socially trained. I'm not going to argue that men don't, in general, have stronger arms and more potential for stronger arms than women, but I'd be shocked if half this "throws like a girl" notion weren't self-perpetuating, because girls don't think they can throw, so they don't practice, and others don't bother to teach them.
I have a lot of theories about why our culture (and maybe the rest of the world?) is so attached to hard gender boundaries, but I'd put it at the root of a lot of these arbitrary divisions and biases.
I suppose it's become one of my most common gripes, measuring something that's easy to measure, rather than what you actually care about. Malcolm Gladwell has a great article about this in What The Dog Saw (a collection of his essays): in so many cases, we're using the wrong heuristics: anything from trying to catch airplane terrorists to reducing dog attacks on humans - we have an idea of what characteristics are good predictors, but when you look at real data, they're lousy. And it's a serious damn shame when we harass a bunch of people who aren't going to do anything wrong (Muslims) or don't encourage half our population in the skills that will certainly be needed in the future (girls in science and tech).
So, no, please don't feel like you're out of line thinking that some divisions shouldn't be assumed. Gender in particular is a tough one, because it seems so obvious in so many things, but I'm sure there are plenty of 5'6" guys who'd love to have a sleeping bag that fit, and others who like pink but are afraid to wear it because of the associations... and us girls who don't want the trainer to go easy on us, because we'd like to be able to do chinups too.
Seriously? Women's parking spaces? I never would have imagined that one! But then, I never *never* went out alone after dark in Vegas or CA either, because it wasn't safe..... It was also a jolt to be reminded that Shauna can't expect equal pay for her work in Zurich. For all our faults as Americans, at least we came up with that one 35 years ago!
I guess another way to look at it all is, how lucky are we to live at a time when we can consider expecting equality? If you had been born just 25 years earlier you would have been stuck protesting and burning bras. My USAF commissioning happened the same week it was decided women could begin training as fighter pilots; my Dad graduated from the AF Academy 22 years before that, 5 years before women were even allowed to attend the Academy. My daughters will be taught all the feminism stuff as history because society will take it for granted (whether it's perfected or not), and will move on to other issues.
Maybe that's a separate discussion altogether: progress can happen so fast in the form of rules and laws, but how long does it take for society to truly change and follow with new and improved customs? Anna Quindlen likes to point out that, yes, we have women on the Supreme Court, but it's still not representative. There is one (were 2) women on it -- that's not quite representative, when a true reflection of our population would mean at least 4, maybe 5, women should be there. But society has to catch up. So we're stuck between being glad for the progress and being frustrated that real changes can take generations.
You're so good at starting a discussion! Wish you were here to share a bottle of wine and really hammer it out! :-) But for now my hands are frozen because heat never seems to get to this corner of the house, and I have to go do my lady-job of taking care of kids. Huh! btw, my little group of first grade math whizzes that I get to tutor a couple time each week includes a brilliant little girl -- she's hispanic, too! Progress is awesome!
You really should be writing a book!!
....in all that spare time you have... love you!
Thanks for all your comments and contributions, guys! This is indeed the sort of discussion I wanted to start. :) I haven't yet woken up yet (c'mon coffee, do your stuff) but a couple of ideas are rattling around in there:
Amy, I agree, I think it's absolutely a matter of measuring what's easy to measure. Designers and manufacturers, for example, try to aim for some mythical middle of the bell curve and thus connect with nobody.
As for societal (apart from marketing) attitudes... it does seem like human nature to define yourself, among other things, based upon what you're not. It just sucks that this also has to mean that some group always pulls the short straw.
And Sarah, yeah, thank GOODNESS we live in the generation we do! When was the last time such a large society set as one of their top values treating all people like people? The Greeks had slaves, the Romans had slaves, the ancient Chinese bound women's feet... I am grateful every day to have been born in a world where I'm not automatically a prisoner. How many great physicists and leaders had the misfortune in the past to be born female?
Indeed, it's difficult to legislate away thousands of years of societal soaking in such attitudes. Each new generation is not born in a vacuum, and I agree, it will take a few of them to build up a foundation of historical equality deep enough to create a meaningful buffer between the attitudes of the Dark Ages and this hopeful new period of (at least the quest for) enlightenment.
I think what I'm complaining about comes exactly from living in this transitional time. My grandmothers already fought the visible fight, and so, born into a world where it was already normal speech to at least *call* everyone equal, it's surprising to me to grow up in a female body and realize that saying ain't doing (or thinking). To hear radio DJs openly scorn women with (supposedly) archaic drivel and think, "Wait, can you still SAY that?? And get AWAY with it?"
How wonderful that I am allowed to be outraged! I should have written the letter that I was already composing in my head... I hope someone else already did. (Hm, that's no excuse...)
I am curious to see how the world will be different when Katie and Chloe choose their majors!
Anyway, to come back to Germany: Weirdly, I don't think German girls actually act or dress more feminine than American women, and German men aren't overtly more macho. And god knows, at our Fachhochschule, half of the professors of business and logistics and mathematics are female. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if what I view as complacency is simply a typical German practicality: Men-are-like-this-and-women-are-like-this is a practical way to categorize and predict -- even if it doesn't actually work! Unfortunately, though, while I think/hope/observe that this doesn't seem to have significantly changed women's behavior any more than the more subtle forms of discrimination do in any other western society, I definitely think it dictates *men's* behavior toward them. I wish women, instead of rolling their eyes or shrugging in response to these attitudes (and then going back to filling test tubes in their laboratories) would respond. I do believe that many more women would be professors and scientists if someone would turn around and slap these idiots. Because Amy, I quite agree that much of what we see as trends in girls' & boys' "abilities" are simply because girls aren't encouraged to study computer science, and boys aren't told they can be schoolteachers.
Well, time for me to go back to *my* lady-job of teaching people. ;) Wishing all my family a wonderful and enlightening day!
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